by Lindsey Kelk
‘I can work with that,’ I said, rolling on top of him. The sand was still awfully hot.
Chapter Eighteen
‘Jenny, it’s me,’ I mumbled into my mobile. ‘Pick up if you’re there?’
Nothing. And I was trapped in a pitch-black apartment with none of the lights working. No matter how many times I flicked the light switch by my bed on and off. My mum would have been very proud.
‘Shit,’ I sighed. ‘Well, if you get this, can you call me back and tell me where the fuse box is? Seriously, what were you thinking, moving to LA?’
I pressed the red button to cancel the call and waved the light from my phone around the room, wandering out into the hallway. Surely it would be somewhere around here? I’d been living in the apartment on my own for a week and so far I’d had to call a plumber in when I dropped my Tiffany necklace down the plughole in the kitchen, call an exterminator in when I mistook one of Jenny’s old clip-in hair extensions for a mouse, and call some random stranger in off the street when a massive spider decided it wanted to share the shower. I was determined to conquer this crisis on my own.
Stupid Alex and his stupid three a.m. phone call. I squinted up above the doorframe, was that big white thing a fuse box? But as much as I appreciated his semi-drunken declaration of love at all hours of the night, if he hadn’t called this time, I wouldn’t have woken up, then I wouldn’t have had to go for a wee and found out the electricity was off. Which would have meant I wouldn’t have worked myself up into a panic that there was a blackout, which would have meant I wouldn’t have called him back and he wouldn’t have worried me even more by saying it was just my electric that was out. Living on my own was not working out well.
I bit down on my bottom lip and pressed my hand to my forehead, not knowing quite what to do. I glanced around, looking for inspiration, and found it sparkling through the window. The city skyline lit up the living room, the Chrysler building outlined in white light down the street. I felt my way across the room, successfully only stubbing my big toe twice.
Leaning against the windowsill, I stared out onto the still busy street below and I breathed out, slightly calmer. How could Jenny leave this? How could year-round sunshine and a convertible compete with New York City? Even now, in the middle of the night, the streets were alive with people. Could Jenny pop on her Uggs right now and be eating chow mein within five minutes? Not likely. Well, it was possible but I was pretty certain she’d have to at least get in that convertible and drive ten miles to find it. I watched a stream of yellow cabs and police cruisers rolling past, couples holding hands and running across the street, trying to beat the light; a general assortment of characters wandering around, ridiculously early on a Tuesday morning, not freaking out because they couldn’t reset their electricity.
‘Come on, Angela,’ I said to myself, ‘this is stupid.’ For a second, I considered just going back to bed and worrying about it in the morning, but I knew it would keep me awake. I was going to beat this. I padded back through the living room, bashing my knee as I went.
On closer, tiptoe, inspection, the white thing over the door did look an awful lot like a fuse box. Only one of the switches was down and, from my feeble recollection, that meant a fuse had tripped. Of course, I didn’t have a stepladder. Or a step. Or anything that could feasibly be used to climb on to reach. I looked at the phone in my hand—I could call Alex? He could probably reach but that would feel a tiny bit like admitting defeat. And I had to be in the office at nine. If he came over now, half cut, there was no way I’d be getting to sleep anytime soon. Which wasn’t a horrible thought, I smiled to myself, but no, I had to do this. I refused to be such a rubbish girl. Unless being a rubbish girl might be just the thing…I dashed back into the bedroom, looking for my highest heels. Two minutes later, I’d accessorized my hot pink Victoria’s Secret pyjama top and American Apparel hot pink boy shorts with my gold Christian Louboutin stilettoes. Very sexy.
I grabbed a can of hairspray from the side of the sink on my way back into the hall and reached up as high as I could, bashing at the cover of the fuse box until it flipped down.
‘Come on,’ I puffed, extraordinarily pleased with myself. I pushed up onto my toes, trying to flip the tripped switch without spraying myself in the eyes with Elnett. Every part of me strained. If I could do this, I could do anything. I could sort out all the bills I had to transfer into my name. I could work out what the 401k thing was on my wage slip from The Look. I could work out what the equivalent to Night Nurse was in the chemist—how many variations on a cold medicine did one city need?
On my seventh little leap, I bashed the lid of the can against the switch, clattering backwards into the door.
‘Angela?’ yelled a voice on the other side.
I jumped up, my heart pounding from the shock of my late-night caller and my admittedly surprising (even to me) success at resetting the fuses.
‘Angela, are you OK? I heard a bang?’
I pushed myself up out of the pile of shoes I’d landed in (Jenny had always been on at me to put them away) and peered through the peephole. It was Alex.
‘Ange, let me in.’ He was standing with one arm against the wall, staring at the floor. ‘I’m not drunk. Well, not really.’
I opened the door slowly, so happy that my heart still skipped a little when I laid eyes on him, even with his flushed cheeks and wide eyes.
‘Very sexy,’ he slid through the door, taking me around the waist. ‘Promise you’ll always be waiting for me in heels at three in the morning?’
‘Oh,’ I blushed, trying to kick my way out of the shoes. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ I’d spent months trying to maintain an illusion of sleeping exclusively in sexy nightdresses or Alex’s old T-shirts. This was not a look I’d have chosen for an impromptu sleepover.
‘So this blackout thing, just a ruse to get me over?’ he asked, pushing me gently backwards towards the bedroom.
‘No,’ I protested, albeit not very strongly. ‘The fuses tripped but I fixed it. Are you proud?’
‘Absolutely,’ he smiled glassily, flicking lights out as we went. ‘I think we should turn the lights out though, just in case.’
‘Just in case,’ I agreed. So I’d be going into the office knackered in the morning. Again.
‘Morning Cici,’ I yawned, sailing past her desk, bright and early and absolutely shattered. ‘Is Mary in yet?’
‘Morning girl-who-turned-James-Jacobs-gay,’ she sang back. ‘Of course she is. Gonna try and turn her too?’
‘It’s been a week. You’re not even starting to get tired of that joke yet, are you?’
She shook her head and smiled sweetly. ‘It’s so not a joke. You turned one of the hottest guys on the planet gay. I should kick your ass. You turned that hipster boyfriend of yours yet?’
‘Not as far as I know.’ I was fairly certain he wasn’t gay after last night. And this morning. And hopefully later this evening.
‘Good, he’s kind of hot. For a hipster,’ she shrugged. ‘Don’t come any closer, I’m dating someone who doesn’t seem to be a complete loser at last and I don’t want you turning me gay either.’
‘I’ll try to keep my distance,’ I promised. Shouldn’t be too bloody hard.
Mary sat at her computer, as always, sharp grey bob swinging as she tapped away at the keyboard, little square glasses halfway down her nose. ‘Angela, honey!’
I froze. Honey? What was wrong?
‘Sit down, honey,’ she said, looking up and switching off her monitor.
Double honey? Something was definitely wrong. And she had never, ever turned off her computer in my presence. I hoped she wasn’t ill.
‘Circulation figures are in for the James Jacobs issue of Icon,’ Mary said. ‘And they’re good.’
‘What’s good?’ I held my breath.
‘Two and a half million good. Up from one and a half.’ She could hardly sit still. ‘There are a lot of very happy faces on the exec floor this morning, Angela Cla
rk.’
I bit my lip a little bit too hard. Two and a half million people were reading my interview? OK, really two and a half million people were reading about James Jacobs being gay, but still, it was my interview.
‘And that’s without factoring in the website hits, the uplift in traffic to your blog, even subscriptions are up. To Icon and The Look.’ Mary broke out into what could only be described as a grin. ‘Angela, I’m so, so proud. And so, so sorry about how hard it was to get here. I know I was kind of an asshole when you were out in LA.’
‘Not at all,’ I said, thinking quite the contrary but being far too English to agree with her. ‘So I’m not in trouble with anyone?’
‘Hardly,’ she beamed. ‘As of the second those numbers came in, you are the A-number-one golden girl of Spencer Media. I think you could march up there and demand your own magazine right now if you wanted it.’
‘Might be a bit ambitious,’ I said, feeling myself colour up. It was now or never. ‘I was thinking, though…’
‘Dangerous pastime.’ Mary raised an eyebrow.
‘What do you reckon the chances would be of me writing more stuff for The Look. I mean, the magazine.’
‘Like?’
‘Like maybe a column? Or some features?’ I sat on my hands to try and avoid biting at my nails. ‘Or anything really?’
‘You know I was joking about your own magazine, right?’ Mary pressed her finger against her lips and shook her bob. ‘You want to write a column in The Look?’
I pushed out my bottom lip and nodded. ‘Any chance of that?’
‘You know I don’t work on the magazine, Angela. It’s not as though I can commission a column for the magazine, just like that.’
‘But you could speak to someone?’ That golden girl status had dropped pretty bloody quickly.
‘Yeah, I could speak to someone. But so could you.’
‘I know I could speak to my editor on the magazine but I really don’t know her as well as you. She just sends me CDs and stuff to review but I don’t see her, hardly ever, and—’
‘That’s not what I meant, Angela,’ she said. ‘I meant, given the position you’re in right now—and I do mean right now as in today—you could go and talk to some other magazines. Your profile is very, very high, but that won’t last long.’
‘But I don’t want to go elsewhere,’ I protested. ‘I love working with you and I don’t—’
‘Yes, but imagine you’d come in here this morning and told me that you’d been approached by another publisher, maybe one of our rivals, and they’d offered you a blog and a column and that you were considering it…’
‘I’m imagining,’ I said slowly.
‘And if you’d told me that, I can’t see that we’d want to let you go, so I would offer you a raise on your blog and offer to speak to the magazine editor right away…So, anything you want to tell me…?’
‘I’ve been approached by another publisher?’
‘And?’
‘They’ve offered me a blog and a column?’
‘Right.’
‘So…’
‘So, I can offer you a raise on the blog and I’ll speak to the magazine editors today.’ Mary flicked her computer screen back on. ‘I’ll call you later.’
‘Thanks, Mary,’ I said, standing up to leave, not entirely certain of what had happened. ‘I’ll speak to you later?’
‘Yes you will,’ she said without looking up. ‘And really good work on the interview, Angela. All the bullshit that went along with it aside, you did great work.’
‘Thanks?’ I was fairly certain it was a compliment. ‘Bye Cici.’
‘Bye girl-who-turned-James-Jacobs-gay.’
Yes, of course I wanted to spend more time here.
‘So you fixed the fuses?’
‘Yes, Jenny,’ I sighed, hustling along Forty-Second Street towards Bryant Park. Already the little square of green was full of busy Midtown workers trying to snatch five minutes in the spring sunshine. The weather had broken in the last week and the streets of New York were suddenly somewhere I wanted to be again and not the subzero enemy of the ballet pump, friend only to the ugly Ugg. The last time I’d been sitting in the park, (trying unsuccessfully to mend a broken heel), it had been so cold, I could barely breath. ‘But seriously, you shouldn’t leave me alone. I’m sure I broke the oven.’
‘You have an oven?’
‘We. We have an oven,’ I practically shouted down my mobile phone. ‘It’s still very much our oven. And yes, it’s definitely there. I found some old cereal boxes in there; you’ve been using it as a cupboard.’
‘You didn’t find a roommate yet?’ she crackled.
‘It’s only been a week,’ Through sheer force of habit, I looked both ways up and down the road, even though the traffic only went north, before sprinting across Sixth Avenue. ‘I haven’t even been looking for a flatmate. I’ve been so busy.’
Which wasn’t entirely untrue. I’d had an entire week of TiVo to catch up on and, well, I was still hoping I would open the door at any second to find Jenny on the doorstep, bag in hand, sobbing that LA was a big bag of crap and she was home for good.
‘Busy turning more hot guys gay?’
‘Don’t you start,’ I muttered. ‘Anyway, how are you? Bored? Missing me? Coming home?’
‘Uh, real answer or answer that will make you feel better?’
‘The second one.’
‘It sucks. It’s been raining every day; I’m not getting to do any sort of styling; totally didn’t meet Ryan Phillippe yesterday and I hate it.’
‘Just as well,’ I said over the swishing and cursing in the background. ‘Jenny Lopez, tell me you are not driving while you’re talking to me.’
‘I’m not driving while I’m talking to you?’
Well, I had asked her to lie.
‘How’s Alex? Everything OK?’ she yelled, but not over her own horn because she wasn’t driving.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I think so. I mean, we had the talk before we left but we haven’t really discussed it since. Any of it.’
‘You two using the L word?’
‘Hmm. Kind of.’
‘You using the L word when you’re not drunk or in bed? Or drunk in bed?’
‘Not really. I feel a bit like the whole LA thing never happened.’
She went quiet for a moment. ‘Doesn’t mean a thing, Angie.’
‘Hmm.’
‘It’s not like he was totally gushing with the emotion before, is it?’
‘Yeah, he sort of was.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘But you don’t think there’s anything wrong?’ she asked. ‘Maybe he’s just, you know, expressing his feelings without words. Baby.’
‘He writes songs for a living, Jenny,’ I replied. ‘I think he’s fairly comfortable with words. I don’t know. I’m just getting so tired of trying to second-guess him, but I don’t want to say anything and risk getting into another deep and meaningful. What if something is wrong and he starts thinking it’s all just too much like hard work?’
‘It does sound a little like hard work, honey,’ she said. ‘You should dump his ass and get back over to LA. You could totally blog from here. Ooh, you and James could do an internet show! It would be awesome.’
‘Maybe,’ I smiled at the thought. It would be awesome. ‘Have you seen him?’
‘Uh, no, because he wasn’t there when I did not met Ryan Phillippe last night. And he did not say to say hi.’
‘Right. I’m going to ignore the Ryan Phillippe thing until you manage to fit it in a third time. He’s OK?’
‘He’s totally OK,’ she confirmed. ‘He’s so out, it’s not even funny. He and Blake are making out all over town. You haven’t seen the pictures?’
‘Strangely enough, I haven’t really been keeping up with the gossip blogs,’ I said. ‘I’m glad everything’s all right for him, though. Blake not so much.’
‘Yeah, right.’ Sh
e broke off to launch a series of impressive expletives at whoever was in the next car. ‘You know how I’m not driving? Well, I didn’t just turn the wrong way down a one-way street so I’m just gonna go because I’m…busy.’
‘Just be careful,’ I tried not to tut. How was I supposed to take care of her if she was living two and a half thousand miles away? ‘I’ll speak to you later. Love you.’
‘Well fuck you too asshole! Love you, Angela,’ she called back and hung up.
After stocking up on too many boxes of cereal and cartons of milk, I ambled upstairs, struggling with my keys. I juggled a box of Lucky Charms, a half-empty Starbucks and my beloved, but now quite frankly knackered handbag, managing to wedge my cereal between the door, my cheek and shoulder while I fumbled my key into the lock, waiting for a click.
‘I could just hold that for you?’
‘Oh God, Alex,’ I gasped, throwing my shopping across the landing, narrowly avoiding blinding him with a box of Cap’n Crunch. ‘I didn’t hear you behind me.’
‘That would be because you were talking to your shopping the whole way up the stairs.’ He took a couple of boxes from me and kissed me on the forehead.
‘I don’t have a flatmate any more, OK?’ I muttered, pushing the door open. ‘I have to talk to someone.’
‘Yeah, I’ve kind of been wanting to talk about that,’ Alex said behind me. But I wasn’t really listening. The apartment was full of flowers. Not just a couple of bouquets on the windowsill and the kitchen counter but actually full. Every surface was groaning with hand-tied bouquets of roses, boxes of lilies, vases spilling over with gerberas and every single arrangement was a different colour. It was so beautiful that the fact a complete stranger had broken into my apartment escaped me for a second. I turned and looked at Alex. Unless it wasn’t a complete stranger. Maybe it was someone who just so happened to be hiding out at the top of my stairs.
‘Did you do this?’ I asked, dropping the rest of my shopping. ‘It’s incredible.’
‘I really want to say yes,’ he said, following me into the apartment. ‘But all I did was this.’